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Dell Revives Itanium 4-way

Dell is taking a second crack at the four-way Itanium space.

This week Dell began shipping the Dell PowerEdge 7250, which supports up to four of Intel's "Madison" generation of Itanium 2 processors. "The PowerEdge 7250 is the highest performing server in our portfolio," Paul Gottsegen, vice president of worldwide marketing in Dell's Product Group, said in a statement.

Dell was among the first major vendors to ship a four-processor system based on Intel Itanium 64-bit technology. But slow sales for the Dell PowerEdge 7150, which was based on the first generation of Itanium processors, led Dell to discontinue the server and skip the second-generation Itanium 2 processors, code-named "McKinley."

Last summer Dell announced its return to the Itanium family with a two-processor server, the Dell PowerEdge 3250, also based on the "Madison" generation of chips. At the time, Dell officials said they believed the Madison generation represented the real coming of age of Itanium technology.

The new server fits in 4U of rack space. It supports up to four Itanium 2 processors with 6 MB of integrated cache and up to 32 GB of system memory and includes eight PCI-X slots. Dell ships the servers with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Systems start at $12,500.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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